1.31.2005

Sister Howard

DemDaily wonders:
Many people are also trying to read into Harold Ickes' endorsement of Dean on Friday. Does it signal which way the Clintons are leaning? And, if so, do they think Dean will make a great chair, or do they just want to make sure he's not a candidate in the 2008 race.
Assuming you buy the theory that everything Clinton insiders do is part of a secret plan to get Hillary elected president in 2008 (I'm not sure I do... it's too easy to be a conspiracy theorist), I think there's a very plausible third explanation: With her liberal credentials pretty well sewn up, what better way for Hillary to appeal to the center than to trash the leader of her own party, who most voters (sorry, Deaniacs!) already see as a hyper-liberal mental case. A "Sister Howard" moment (say, right after she sows up the nomination) would be eaten up by the media--nothing's more fun than an intra-party fight--and establish Hillary's moderate bona fides more effectively than a dozen speeches recalibrating her position on abortion.

And it's not like Howard "I Hate Republicans and Everything They Stand For" Dean won't provide all sorts of great opportunities for the junior senator from New York to take the high ground.

It's so devious it just might be true!


1.28.2005

Yeah, about that flu vaccine shortage...

Remember those lines of seniors, shivering in the cold and waiting hours to get their flu shots? Well now they can't give the stuff away:

State unable to sell flu vaccine bought from Europe

Back in October, John Kerry and the democrats, with the enthusiastic help of the media, tried to make the flu shot "crisis" into a liability for the Bush administration. After all, if seniors are waiting in line for hours and clinics are running out of flu shots well before they can meet demand, something must have gone terribly wrong!

It was obvious to me at the time that, despite the media's breathless coverage, there was no serious problem and that everyone who wanted a flu shot was going to get one--without having to get on the flu shot tour bus to Canada, even! This is exactly what has happened.

So why the shivering seniors getting in lines of a length more commonly seen at the Red Sox ticket office? Actually, it's much the same phenomenon.

Tickets to Red Sox games sell out, and unless the ownership builds a new stadium, or Major League Baseball decides to play in the snow, there's always going to be the same fixed quantity available, a quantity that's smaller than the (huge) demand. So obsessed fans (like me) line up at 6:00am in the bitter December cold and wait all day for a chance to buy some.

By endlessly hyping the temporary shortage of available shots, the media created the impression that at some point all the shots would be gone, and if you hadn't gotten one you were out of luck. It shouldn't be surprising then, that seniors, legitimately concerned at the risk to their health if they didn't get a flu shot, jumped on every clinic like the Fenway Faithful on Sox/Yankees tickets. I bet a substantial number of these seniors didn't usually get their flu shots in October, months before the flu season started, just like Sox fans didn't used to buy their tickets in December, months before opening day, when there was a lot less demand. But when you create the impression of a scarce resource, the demand gets bunched up at the beginning, and you get long lines at the ticket office or health clinic. When the media broadcasts pictures of these lines, the impression of a severe shortage is reinforced, exacerbating the problem further.

Of course, flu shots aren't like Red Sox tickets: when there's demand, supply can go up, and it did. By December (the usual start of the flu season), just about anyone who wanted to get a flu shot could have one.

The media and the democrats should be ashamed that they fanned the flames of this story and scared a lot of the elderly and infirm just to get some good footage and campaign material.

Composable memory transactions

This paper by Simon Peyton Jones and others seems promising. ACID transactions are one of the most useful formalisms to come out of database research, and it's long past time they worked their way down the stack to "lower level" languages and applications than SQL and databases.

A similar approach from an operating system POV is being taken by the Coyotos project, the descendent of EROS. Note their smart use of split phase (prepare/action) kernel invocations.

1.24.2005

Firefox Cut and Paste

This is apparently rant day.

I am incredibly frustrated with Firefox's cut and paste. It's buggy and it doesn't reliably follow Windows conventions.

If I double-click on the address of a page to highlight it, and press Ctrl-C, it should be copied to the clipboard. But no, it isn't.

Right-click on the highlighted text, select Copy. Nope, still the clipboard is empty.

Go back to the previous page, right-click on the link with the URL I am trying to get, select Copy Link Location. Nope, that doesn't do it either.

It's basic stuff like this that should be automatic. When it's not, it's a major frustration.

Now I'm off to search Bugzilla to see if it's a known issue...

UPDATE: Yes it is. Seems I'm not the only one infuriated by it, either.

UPDATE 2: I should comment that despite the whining nature of this post, it is really terrific that such a great open source browser is available with an easy-to-browse open bug database!


Shovel as I say, not as I do

Like many other cities, Cambridge insists that residents shovel the public sidewalks in front of their dwellings or businesses within 12 hours after snow stops falling. It's a reasonable requirement, and keeps pedestrians off dangerously slippery roads.

Of course, it would be nice if Cambridge took responsibility for clearing pedestrian walkways that aren't in front of dwellings or businesses. This morning there was not a single route from the north side to the south side of Memorial Drive near the Longfellow Bridge that didn't involve trudging through 3-4 feet drifts. The newly paved sidewalk down the embankment to the pedestrian underpass was completely snowed under. As a result, pedestrians had to either go a quarter mile out of their way to Kendall Square, or share snow and ice covered roads with Memorial Drive's busy commuter traffic.

Ways and Means chairman tries to sink Social Security reform

This is pretty clearly a stupid, petty attempt by Chaiman Thomas to create unnecessary controversy around Bush's social security plan. Nobody in his right political mind would suggest tying social security benefits to gender, let alone race! By creating this mess, Thomas hopes to sully Bush's plan before it's even introduced. It's no secret he's miffed Bush chose to push SS reform over his pet issue, tax reform. But instead of helping Bush get SS done, and move on to taxes, he's doing everything he can to get in the way. From Robert Novak's January 1 column:
While President Bush always has planned not to tackle tax reform until 2006 after the Social Security change is passed, the most influential tax drafter in Congress has been quietly planning to put Social Security and tax reform together.

Rep. Bill Thomas of California, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, has been working with fellow Republicans on his committee to combine the two massive reforms. Thomas keeps secret the details of his plan, but colleagues say it is a workable concept. The conventional wisdom has been that Social Security and tax reform are such complicated and difficult questions that they must be approached separately.
Hey Chairman Thomas: how many votes did you get this November? I bet it wasn't 61 million. Maybe you should let the White House take the lead on their signature issue rather than concocting secret plans with no chance of passing, even without you making a fool out of yourself on Meet the Press.

Democrats are going to have a field day with this, as well they should.

Republicans from the White House on down need to excoriate Thomas, publically.

1.19.2005

Turnaround at Au Bon Pain

I didn't really intend for this to be a foodblog, but given that I am obsessed with eating, I guess it's not surprising that the subject comes up frequently. My tastes run the gamut from fast food to gourmet, all of it horribly bad for me. Don't be surprised if I rave about everything I write about here; I'm very excitable when it comes to food, and I'm much more likely to be inspired to blog about something I found delicious.

I've run hot and cold on the Boston-based sandwich-maker Au Bon Pain over the years. They really do have terrific bread, and were serving creative café sandwiches long before Panera Bread was the darling of Wall Street. On the other hand, the quality of ingredients and service has been decidedly uneven, and for a long time the menu was stagnant.

Fortunately, four years after being acquired by the U.K.-based Compass Group, they've started doing a lot of things right: The new ordering scheme, with paper forms going directly to the sandwich makers, is a big improvement from trying to explain what you wanted to a cashier with 10 people waiting behind you. Service, at least at the Kendall Square location I frequent, has become friendly and capable. Delectable new meats and cheeses and their new "artisanal" breads have spiced up the menu. Every other week, it seems, there's a new sandwich to try, and my experimentation has been rewarded as they've been uniformly delicious.

The inspiration for this entry was their latest stroke of culinary genius, the "baked sandwich". Available premade in three varieties (the tuna with cheddar and red peppers is particularly scrumptious), they're rosemary foccacia rolls stuffed with ingredients and baked in parchment paper. They're a win-win for customers and the store: they taste great and are ready right away, and premade so they save work during the lunch rush. They've also resisted the temptation to load them up with spreads and other extras that would push the calorie count into the stratosphere.

The chain is still not all the way there: service at outlying locations (e.g. the Davis Square store in Somerville) is weak, and the newly redecorated Kendall Square location has the style of a bad airport lounge (and I like airport lounges), but they've made terrific progress.

UPDATE: I note from the referral logs that several people have hit this post while looking for nutritional information on these sandwiches. Au Bon Pain is one of the better fast-casual places in this area, and keeps their website pretty up to date with their latest options. Here's the info on the parchment-wrapped baked sandwiches. Luckily for me, the tuna is one of the healthiest!

BONUS UPDATE: Here's a BusinessWeek article on the trend and the chef behind these blockbuster sandwiches.